At work, I moved into my current office in the autumn of 2015. We’re moving some of our offices around, and mine is one of them, so I’m cleaning out some old stuff – business cards of people who have switched jobs, business cards for companies that no longer exist, and (sadly) a business card for someone who passed away a couple of years ago.
Oh, and I found a whole bunch of these things.
For my younger readers, I should explain that these cases hold something known as “compact discs.” You see, back before iTunes or Amazon Music or any of those services, if you wanted to buy music, you would actually have to go to a physical store (kinda like a 7 Eleven, but these stores had names like “Tower Records” and “Licorice Pizza”), get a physical item like a compact disc or a tape or a vinyl platter, take it home (or, in some cases, to your car), insert the physical item into a player, and play the music that way.
For most of my life, that’s the way we did things. The physical media changed from time to time, but the concept pretty much stayed the same. I have long since thrown away most of my vinyl records and all of my cassette tapes, but I’ve retained most of my CDs.
And, for the last three years, several of my CDs have been sitting in an office drawer, untouched.
Incidentally, I do have to correct one statement that I made above. At least two of these cases do NOT hold a compact disc. Somewhere along the line, I lost my disc of Air’s “Moon Safari,” but I’m saving the case, on the off chance that I will find it at some point. The other missing CD is Ontario Emperor’s “Or a Little Faster,” which may also be floating around somewhere. (But society would agree that the Air CD is a greater loss.)
Oh, and regarding the two CDs at the top of the stacks:
Yes, Maria (Maria is a young Italian woman), I do have a CD of “that old guy” Zucchero.
And yes, everyone else, I do own a Ray Stevens CD. And “In the Mood” is truly a classic. (Sadly, the CD does not include “Misty,” which is a comedy classic in its own right.)
